Steve Jobs Could Learn A Thing Or Two About Game Development [Update]

Steve Jobs, boss of Apple, sure knows how to make a pretty computer, a decent mobile phone and a great music player. But video games? Not his specialty, especially when it comes to development.

Speaking at the Develop conference in Britain yesterday, Unity CEO David Helgason was asked what he thought of Jobs’ belief that the use of middleware only results in “crappy” applications. His response?

https://gizmodo.com/steve-jobs-responds-to-developer-agreement-concerns-5514300

“He doesn’t understand the economics of game development fundamentally”.

There’s no getting around it. Making a crude little weather or guitar tuning app might be easier and smoother using only one team’s code, but games aren’t simple little apps. They’re complex beasts which rely on middleware to run smoothly.

And if games are such a big bread-winner for Apple on the App Store – which they are – you’d think Jobs would be a little more open-minded on the subject!

UPDATE – A few readers have pinged us to let us know that Jobs is referring to certain types of middleware, not all types of middleware; specifically, ones like Unity that “bottle up” game code (in Unity’s case so it can run on multiple platforms) instead of allowing it to “roam free”.

That being the case, an apology is in order: sorry, Steve Jobs!

Unity CEO: ‘Steve Jobs doesn’t understand the economics of game development’ [ME]